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MURRAY PERAHIA'S new recording of three Bach keyboard concertospays a little attention to history but not too much, and this may be its mainattraction. All of these pieces display a secondhand authenticity to begin with. Thepopular D minor began as a violin concerto, but we have lost the original. Thegentler E major has clouded origins. The A major, say the program notes for thisSony Classical release, first had an oboe d'amore as its solo instrument.

When Bach was rearranging the concertos for his musical-social club in Leipzig, hehad few apparent thoughts for their pristine original state, yet we hear no protestsfrom the early-music lobby over Bach's violations of himself. Perhaps the pure ofheart are saving their indignation for another new CD: an EMI reissue of DinuLipatti's performance of Bach's D minor Concerto with Eduard van Beinum and theConcertgebouw Orchestra, which appends the dreaded "-Busoni" to the greatcomposer's name.

Both of these recordings play fast and loose with period correctness, Mr. Perahia'sperhaps being the more discreet. Both he and his smartly prepared Academy of St.Martin-in- the-Fields whale away with modern piano and strings and, as far as I cantell, at a thoroughly up-to-date level of pitch. He does use the theorbo, a kind ofbass lute, for continuo parts, surmising that it, rather than a second harpsichord,would have been easier to carry into Zimmermann's Coffee House, where theseKonzert-Kaffeeklatsches took place.

What we have here are performances that are out of time: not a bad place to putthem. They neutralize history, telling stories whose truths and untruths are irrelevant.Patina and restoration alike give them a new identity. It makes us wonder whetherall music is contemporary. For those who insist on historical context, Mr. Perahia'sBach looks judiciously both backward and forward: to the left of ColonialWilliamsburg but quite a ways from the Swingle Singers or Robert Moog'ssynthesizer.

The Lipatti performance, recorded live and somewhat obscurely in 1947, is evenmore Darwinian in adapting to its surroundings. The audience in Amsterdam had yetto be affected by the archaeological army soon to make war on big orchestras, A =440 pitch and strings made of metal, not gut. If Mr. Perahia's D minor is brisk anddriven, the Lipatti is much slower. Weight and gravitational pull have the same effecton music, I think, as they do on any physical object accelerating from a state of rest.

The idea of heaviness as a function of time also turns the word "gravity" to itsmetaphorical meaning. Mr. Perahia's zip and vigor are wonders of articulation andhonest energy; the music flies. But there is a case for the measured, dignifiedprogress of the Lipatti tempos as well. Lipatti's playing has a bittersweet ironycommon to almost all the recordings he made of 18th-century repertory. His wasperhaps the truest, most Apollonian heart ever to sit at the piano, and here we find itworking splendidly from editions that today's scholars could only call corrupt.

Busoni's main contribution to the string parts is sheer numbers. In the piano solos heinterjects treble filigree and booming bass octaves to shore up big climaxes.Repeated figures turn up with thirds or sixths attached. It is all beautifully done andnot at all grotesque. Busoni turns Bach into a model late-19th-century rhetorician.Lipatti, we are told, was well aware of Bach's original but thought the update whollyappropriate.

Also on this CD are live recordings of the Liszt E flat Concerto and the Bartok No.3. Ernest Ansermet conducts the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Paul Sacherthe Southwest German Radio Orchestra. The sound is murky and uneven, buthearing this pianist in 1947 and 1948 is instructive under any conditions. He died ofleukemia in 1950, at 33.

His few studio recordings reveal perhaps the first instrumentalist of the newlong-playing era fully to understand the nature of the process. Whereas ArturSchnabel had in the 1930's refused the opportunity to redo suspect takes, seeingrecordings as mere anecdotes, Lipatti seems to have sensed the permanence ofthese enterprises, their irreversibility and their status as monuments.

Mr. Perahia has spent (in my mind, wasted) a part of his career proving to the worldthat he can play the big Lisztian pieces of the repertory. And so he can, even if thetriumphs over music like the "Mephisto Waltzes" have sounded somewhat grim andjoyless. Apparently recovered from the hand injury that laid him low for a number ofyears, he is showing us in these Bach recordings virtuosity in a more significant senseof the word.

Indeed, the ability to execute intricate passagework at rapid speeds in theseperformances without betraying a hint of pressure or anxiety is absolutelyextraordinary. The scale- arpeggio-octave school of pianism is one demonstration ofa pianist's physical skill. Less demonstrative but perhaps more testing are Bach'scrossing patterns and the necessity to sort them out by means of varied weights andpressures. This is what finger control is about, although it, like all musical virtuosity,begins in the ears, not the hands.

As to Busoni, Lipatti and modern pianos and violins, I suggest a walk through theForum in Rome, where medieval architects happily attached churches to ancientpagan buildings with an eye to making the past serve the present. The results arestirring. I don't think Bach would have minded being desecrated, just so long as hewas desecrated well.